


Leave the lights on.  Keep talking.

by norgbelulah



Category: Justified
Genre: Misunderstanding, Multi, Past Relationship(s), Post Season 3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-29
Updated: 2012-06-29
Packaged: 2017-11-08 19:25:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 972
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/446652
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/norgbelulah/pseuds/norgbelulah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>'If we wanted to tell you everything, we would leave more footprints in the snow, or kiss you harder.'</p>
            </blockquote>





	Leave the lights on.  Keep talking.

**Author's Note:**

  * For [](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts).



> Written for [Round 2 of the Summer in Harlan Comment fic meme](http://nvrleaveharlan.livejournal.com/12791.html) over at nvrleaveharlan on LJ.

“I kissed Raylan in a car, once,” Boyd tells her the day they put Arlo in prison.

He’s been quiet all morning, and Ava knows something is troubling him. She is sitting at the table and he’s making them BLTs for lunch. 

His hands, which had been busy with bread and tomatoes, are still and his eyes are out the window by the sink. He never talks about Raylan, never in this house, never when it’s about the past. Raylan the lawman lives in the bar, with the business.

Even when Raylan came to the house after Helen, they didn’t speak about it later. Raylan the lawman wasn’t welcome here, and the Raylan of the past was gone, ‘til now. 

“Why did you do that?” she asks him.

He doesn’t answer right away. She hadn’t expected him to, really. She only wants him to know it doesn’t bother her. She kissed Raylan on a car once. She kissed him many times more than just the once.

He finishes the sandwiches and they eat in silence. She doesn’t try to smile at him, doesn’t try to reassure. She knows he wasn’t looking for validation, or really for anything from her at all. She thinks perhaps he only told her because he needed to say it out loud, right at that moment. 

Ava thinks that’s just fine. She knows how buried secrets need to be unearthed sometimes, even in Harlan. Old secrets need air eventually, or they get forgotten.

She wouldn’t want Boyd to forget Raylan.

 

They are away for the weekend, out of Harlan, when she asks him.

Boyd needs contacts in Frankfort, so they go there and later they mess around in the hotel room. They’re just kissing at first, making out like kids on the bed, like they had to spring for this place to make time together.

He’s got his hand up her skirt and his lips on her neck when the words just fall from her lips. “Did you ever fuck him?”

She thinks it must have been a question needed to be asked without thought, without plan. She sure as hell didn’t mean to say that.

There is no confusion over who she means, there wouldn’t be. The silence stretches long in her perception and he is still against her, until he isn’t anymore.

“No,” he breathes the past into her ear. “He didn’t know that’s what I wanted.”

She kisses him again after that and they fuck, slow and sweet. 

There is music coming from down the hall and they doze through the early morning to it and drift through unspoken memories.

 

Ava dreams of Raylan sometimes, the way she dreams of dead relatives and fourth grade classmates. She dreams him in wheat fields and on darkened, deserted roadsides, blank-faced, waiting.

Sometimes she’ll wake with a start from those dreams, and Boyd will shift, or half-wake with her and wrap his arms around her. She’ll pull close to him and she’ll think, why didn’t he understand?

 

They talk often. They talk about everything, all the time. But it is only in the quiet moments that Raylan is uncovered, dusted off, to think about, to speak of. They unwrap him slow with Boyd’s words, one thing at a time.

Boyd keeps his voice soft when he talks about the boy, about the things Boyd loved about him, in the kitchen in the morning, in the bedroom late at night. Ava stays quiet, smiles and agrees with him. Yes, he looked so good in that uniform, no, the mine was never any place for him. 

And she listens when Boyd picks up the small things, the way his lips would crook when he thought he knew better than you, the way his eyes would get big then real small when you showed him up right. 

She puts her hands on him, to ease and steady, when he tells her the things he wanted to do and she hides her face when he confesses to evil because he didn’t do them, then told himself he shouldn’t have ever wanted at all.

He wakes from dreams he won’t share with her some nights and she doesn’t think Raylan’s in them, but they’re full of him anyway, his absence, his neglect. 

It’s unfair of her to think of it like that, she knows. They drove each other away in the end, one thing for another.

 

The snow is falling in Harlan and there’s an explosion outside of Ava’s house.

It’s a car wrecked into a semi and Raylan’s stumbling out of the driver’s side door. Boyd is cursing and running and when they reach him, Raylan is coherent enough to say, “Believe it or not, this has nothing to do with you.”

He’s smiling at them both, like nothing is wrong, and Boyd thinks he has a concussion. He’s got his hands on Raylan and Raylan is letting him and Ava is watching them, before she pleads that they both come into the house.

The snow is falling along with the temperature and Raylan can tell whoever to come get him there.

Raylan grins at her and says the fire is plenty warm. Then Boyd drags him inside.

Ava sees their footprints cross over each other as she follows them in. She steps around them, and hopes they keep for the night.

 

They don’t come get Raylan for a while. Everyone’s in Lexington he tells them in a slow way. Ava makes him some tea and ignores his plea for booze. Boyd still thinks he has a concussion. They don’t let him sleep, but he dozes, lids falling, eyes far away, on her couch.

Boyd watches him, quiet and pensive. He looks at Boyd, coming back to them, and tells him, “Spit it out.”

Boyd crooks a smile and says, “Guess, Raylan.”

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Truth's Day Star](https://archiveofourown.org/works/542163) by [perdiccas](https://archiveofourown.org/users/perdiccas/pseuds/perdiccas)




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